Innehållsförteckning för April 2014 från Discover

When it came time to pick the cover for this issue, it wasn’t much of a debate. “The Second Coming of Sigmund Freud” (page 54) was the clear choice for our cover story, and not just for the light it sheds on the fascinating field of neuropsychoanalysis, or the new ways in which Freud’s insights into the mind could aid the study of the brain. As one of our editors said during our cover meeting: “Whether his theories were right or wrong, Freud’s pretty iconic. Almost as iconic in his way as Einstein. Why wouldn’t we put him on the cover?” Of course, some of you might not consider that a rhetorical question, and already may be composing a vigorously worded response. That’s the thing about heroes and icons: We…

For 20 hours in spring 2012, a red helicopter crisscrossed northwest Cambodia, flying over one of the world’s greatest archaeological sites: Angkor, the onetime heart of Southeast Asia’s Khmer Empire. A team led by archaeologist Damian Evans beamed a laser pulse 200,000 times per second from the helicopter toward the dense forest below. They hoped a few pulses would slip through tiny gaps in the lush canopy and, by bouncing off objects and earth, send back secrets from a long-lost metropolis. It worked. By calculating the precise distance of each split-second journey, Evans and his team captured the remarkably orderly contours of long-hidden cityscapes. The work has revealed never-before-seen footprints of ancient roads, canals, ponds, field walls, occupation mounds and other facets of urban life in the heyday of the…

New Zealand’s largest earthquake of 2013 hit the country’s second-most populated area — and nobody felt a thing. No buildings collapsed, no roads buckled, not a single teacup toppled off a shelf. The quake, equivalent to magnitude 7 on the Richter scale, stretched out over months, and only the most sensitive seismic instruments picked up the tectonic action near Wellington. Geologists are keen to understand whether these “slow earthquakes” are merely leaks of tectonic pressure, like the hiss of air from a punctured tire, or warning signs of a more dangerous, fast-moving temblor. “Until slow earthquakes were observed 10 to 15 years ago, conventional wisdom held that faults either released energy slowly and steadily by creeping, or would store tectonic stress until they failed catastrophically,” moving at a rate of…

Oceanographers have mapped the seafloor and tracked endangered marine species for decades using autonomous underwater vehicles, or AUVs. But the ocean is a huge, constantly moving three-dimensional ecosystem, and obtaining precise, real-time observations of marine life and of oceanic conditions such as temperature, current and salinity is quite challenging and astronomically expensive. “Because of this, it has not been possible to get large-scale bulk phenomena over large spatial and temporal domains. You can’t do it with a ship,” says Kanna Rajan, an engineer at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute who studies artificial intelligence capable of making decisions. That’s why he wants to do it with robots. When Rajan met Joao Sousa, an engineer at the University of Porto in Portugal, an idea for how to study the oceans in…

Mind reading usually conjures images of scam artists with crystal balls, but a group of San Francisco neuroscientists and engineers is developing a device that can do it sans crystal ball. Their research aims to figure out what people with paralysis or brain injury are trying to say by studying how they attempt to move their mouths. By decoding patterns in the part of the brain that orchestrates the movement of the lips, tongue, jaw and larynx, the mechanical mind reader — a speech prosthetic — will give these people a voice through a computer-driven speech synthesizer. In the short term, the device would help patients whose brains can’t drive the vocal machinery in their mouths. That includes the thousands of people with brain trauma, spinal cord injury, stroke or…

A few years ago, Avi Loeb spent some time with his family near Cradle Mountain in the highlands of central Tasmania, a rugged island 150 miles south of Australia. Their cabin had no Internet connection, affording Loeb some free time after dinner to step outside and look up at the clear night sky, untainted by any trace of urban glow. He was bowled over by a dazzling spectacle: the countless stars of our galaxy, the Milky Way, airily stretched across the heavens. Off to the side, he could see our nearest galactic neighbor, Andromeda, a twinkling, iridescent patch roughly the size of the moon. Taking in the view for hours, Loeb, chairman of Harvard’s astronomy department and director of its Institute for Theory and Computation, was overwhelmed upon seeing the…

The beast at the heart of our galaxy lurks so stealthily that for a long time many scientists were not certain it existed at all. The first hint of that monster came in February 1974, when astronomers Bruce Balick and Robert Brown discovered an unusually compact source of radio waves at the exact center of the Milky Way, some 26,000 light-years away. Brown subsequently named this enigmatic object Sagittarius A* (pronounced “A star“), after the constellation where it appears in the sky. Then came more hints of something strange in the neighborhood: a trickle of X-rays from the same spot, tendrils of agitated gas surrounding it and, most telling, a small group of stars racing around madly for no obvious reason. Tracking the motions of those stars enabled astronomers to…

THE REMEDY By Thomas Goetz In the late 19th century, tuberculosis was responsible for 1 in every 4 deaths worldwide. Rich and poor, young and old, no one was safe. Rumors of a possible cure sent thousands of desperate patients to Germany — and aroused the curiosity of an English country doctor (and aspiring writer) named Arthur Conan Doyle. He traveled to Berlin to learn more about the alleged remedy and its creator, Robert Koch, a detail-mad perfectionist. What Doyle witnessed, however, was the unraveling of both Koch’s career and the hope of a cure. Former Wired executive editor Goetz weaves the suspense of a Sherlock Holmes mystery into a tale of ambition, obsession, scientific discovery and skepticism at the dawn of modern medicine. – GEMMA TARLACH THE AGE OF…

April2014 SCIENCE FESTIVAL LINEUP Love a good a science festival? April’s your month. Check out this listing for festivals around the country — or maybe in your own backyard: 4/1-4/6 Michigan State University Science Festival East Lansing, Mich., sciencefestival.msu.edu 4/18-4/27 The Cambridge Science Festival Cambridge, Mass., cambridgesciencefestival.org 4/24-4/27 Nebraska Science Festival Omaha, Neb., nescifest.com 4/25-5/3 Philadelphia Science Festival Philadelphia, philasciencefestival.org 4/26-4/27 USA Science and Engineering Festival Washington, D.C., usasciencefestival.org 4/25-5/3 Las Vegas Science and Technology Festival Las Vegas, lasvegassciencefestival.com 4/15 When the Moon Goes Dark Large portions of North and South America, the Pacific, New Zealand and eastern Australia are treated to a total lunar eclipse tonight. astronomy.com/aprilmoon 4/18 Bears Release Disneynature’s film is the story of two mother bears, their cubs and their survival in the Alaskan wilderness, getting…

Don’t be shy about sharing your opinions, whether via letters, email or our social media communities. Here’s what you’ve been telling us lately. JOIN THE CONVERSATION Send email to: editorial@DiscoverMagazine.com Address letters to: DISCOVER 21027 Crossroads Circle P.O. Box 1612 Waukesha, WI 53187-1612 Connect with us on: Facebook facebook.com/DiscoverMag Twitter twitter.com/DiscoverMag Google+ plus.google.com/+discovermagazine Questioning Randomness December’s issue included an excerpt from Our Mathematical Universe by MIT professor Max Tegmark. His book suggests that the physical world is one big mathematical object. I am 14 years old and was very interested by Max Tegmark’s article “Math Made Flesh,” but I had one question. How does this theory account for radioactive decay or other random events? Are these things not truly random, or is there some mathematical equation for true randomness that…

Evolutionary biologist Christopher Muir has seen plenty of unusual vegetation while exploring tropical rainforests, from a foot-long flower to a plant that uses ants to protect itself. But it was in a hallway near his office at the University of the Balearic Islands in Spain that he spied something truly memorable: a holey houseplant, Monstera deliciosa, also known as the Swiss cheese plant for the large holes that punctuate its leaves. The plant immediately struck Muir (a distant relative of famed naturalist John Muir) as odd because plants need to maximize surface area to absorb as much sunlight as possible. They can do this by either having lots of small leaves, or fewer large ones. Why, Muir wondered, would this large-leafed plant punch windows in its foliage? Searching for a…

During a research trip to northwest India’s Keoladeo National Park in 2011, Jessica Yorzinski sat inside a hunting blind. Searing summer temperatures caused her camcorders to malfunction. Animals — probably jackals — growled and scratched at her shelter, while a speaker blared an odd hooting noise. She watched for peahens to approach. They did, far more frequently on days when Yorzinski, then a postdoc biologist at Duke University, played a particular peacock mating call, called a hoot-dash, than when she played nothing. Male animals often use mating calls to attract females, but the hootdash is peculiar. Indian blue peacocks emit a single ecstatic hoot just before dashing less than a yard toward females to mount them. “Few species emit courtship calls directly before copulating,” says Yorzinski, now at Purdue University.…

It’s an animal-eat-plant world out there, with the consumers and consumed engaged in a continuous evolutionary race to come out ahead. Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have uncovered a new twist in one roadside weed’s strategy: It makes itself less palatable when it senses an herbivore lurking nearby, instead of waiting to be attacked. Ecologist John Orrock, who studies how animals balance the need to protect themselves from predation with other needs, such as eating and mating, hatched the idea for this research when he was studying snails in a California grassland. He already knew that plants can change their chemical structure to protect themselves once attacked, or just touched, by a hungry herbivore. But what if the aggressor were just hanging around, looking at its options? The fact…

I stood peering into the patient’s abdomen, feeling like an animal chased to the edge of a cliff. I knew that at some point the only option was to dive into the chasm. The anesthesiologist’s voice sounded from the head of the bed. “Pressure’s still not good. I’m pushing fluids.” His eyes widened as he looked over the blue paper drape at the bloody mass. “Oh my God,” he murmured. “What’s your plan?” I was a senior surgical trainee on rotation at a small downtown hospital not far from the university medical center where I normally worked — and where a trauma center surgical team was on duty every night. Here, I was the only surgeon on site after hours. Ambulance drivers routed seriously injured patients here only when police…

It is a dark night on a lonely highway outside Sante Fe, N.M. In the distance on either side of the road, you can still see the looming outlines of stately mesas. “That’s all sedimentary rock up there. If you need to urinate, I’m happy to pull over,” Matt Lewin says as I glance out the window. “Some of the greatest fossil discoveries on Earth have been made from taking a piss.“ Lewin is not being sarcastic. For him, a drive down a New Mexico highway is something between taking a trip to Disneyland and being subjected to Chinese water torture. Miles upon miles of potential finds lie in wait, but each mile marker represents another lost opportunity. A few times he can’t contain himself, and we pull over to…

Particle Fever has all the trimmings of a Hollywood blockbuster: an epic quest, memorable characters, a tension-filled climax and a huge crash sequence. There’s also an ending that begs for a sequel. It’s got a romantic angle, too: The movie is, at its heart, a love story between physicists and the elusive truths they pursue. The documentary takes viewers behind the scenes at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) outside Geneva, Switzerland, from early test runs to the 2012 success of finding the Higgs boson. Fever handles the science nimbly, including perspectives of both theorists, who come up with ways to explain our universe, and experimentalists, who try to prove (or disprove) their ideas. But the movie’s greatest strength may be its human dimension. Following half a dozen scientists at different…

Two new public television shows explore the connection between our species and the rest of the animal kingdom, with surprising results. INSIDE ANIMAL MINDS NOVA’s three-part “Inside Animal Minds” melds the latest research on animal cognition with in-the-field profiles of some amazing critters, such as a bird whose problem-solving skills are something to crow about. PBS, 9 p.m. EDT April 2, 9 and 16 YOUR INNER FISH Based on a popular book of the same name by paleontologist Neil Shubin, the three-part series Your Inner Fish traces our often unexpected evolutionary connections with other species, including reptiles and shrews. PBS, 10 p.m. EDT April 9, 16 and 23…

Constellations are pictures made of stars, but not all pictures made of stars are constellations. Technically these other star patterns are asterisms, but psychologically they are the most real constellations of all — the ones that reflect current sensibilities and that show up well in light-polluted skies. The most obvious one is the Big Dipper, a subset of stars in Ursa Major (the Great Bear), high overhead this month. Anyone can pick out the dipper; few can connect the dots to draw a bear. The Little Dipper is another, much fainter, asterism and includes Polaris (the North Star) at the end of its handle. Down low, on the opposite side of Polaris from the Big Dipper, is a prominent W-shaped zigzag of stars; forget trying to see it as Queen…

High above the Alps, the International Space Station’s robotic arm prepares to grasp the unmanned Cygnus spacecraft on Jan. 14. In its first fully loaded supply mission, Cygnus carried over 2,700 pounds of provisions and science gear, including microsatellites, material for antibiotics research and a colony of ants. Cygnus and the Antares rocket that carried it to orbit were designed and built by Orbital Sciences, only the second private company (after SpaceX) to send a payload to the ISS. – ERNIE MASTROIANNI; PHOTO BY NASA…

The indigenous village of Lajamanu, population 600, sits on the southern edge of the subtropics of northern Australia. It’s the kind of place where a truck rumbles in once a week to deliver staples to the local store, and where electricity comes from diesel and solar generators. It’s so remote that the oldest members of the community still remember the first time they saw a white person in the 1930s. Carmel O’Shannessy landed on Lajamanu’s dirt airstrip in 1998 as a government employee sent to support local teachers of English and Warlpiri, a language spoken in several places in the Northern Territory. By 2001, she realized that the children had been busy inventing an entirely new mixed language, borrowing words and grammar from both mother tongues. O’Shannessy, now a linguist…

In a lab in Cambridge, Mass., a vacuum chamber the size of a shoebox has made history. Here, Harvard physicist Ofer Firstenberg has created a new form of matter: a pair of photons, stuck together. The “light molecule” is, potentially, the building block of technology that uses some form of tangible light — from light sculptures to lightsabers to (perhaps more practically) computers that can perform vastly more complex calculations than today’s machines. Unlike atoms and the matter they’re made of, two photons on a collision course will simply pass through one another, with no interaction. To get photons to stick together, a first step for all the above technologies, Firstenberg and his team used a setup they’ve spent years perfecting. They rigged a specialized metal box with a laser…

Q: Since quantum entanglement enables us to know both the simultaneous position and velocity of subatomic particles, doesn’t that invalidate the uncertainty principle? — Gary D. Podolner Chicago A Let’s back up a minute, first. When two particles — let’s call them photons A and B — are “entangled,” it means that the act of measuring a property of photon A (say, its position) reveals the value of this same property for photon B. According to the uncertainty principle, however, physicists can only know so much about two related properties of a particle simultaneously. For example, the more certain they are about a photon’s position (where it is), the less they know about its momentum (where it’s going). You’d think that, in theory, one could try to make separate measurements…

Though math and art may seem like complete opposites, for some artists, mathematics actually provides a rich vein of ideas for an artist to tap. And, conversely, exploring those ideas artistically can offer new insights into the mathematics involved. This fusion can result in deeply beautiful and meaningful objects like the ones you’ll see here, our favorites from competitive displays at recent Joint Mathematics Meetings, which bring together thousands of mathematically inclined individuals. Hyperbolic Lamp Shade Crochet, 24" x 24" Gabriele Meyer’s Hyperbolic Lamp Shade is the physical manifestation of the solution to a 2,000-year-old mathematical conundrum. From extraordinarily simple, apparently unassailable assumptions called axioms (such as “Things that are equal to the same thing are also equal to one another“), Greek mathematician Euclid deduced surprising truths that seemed to…

THE PARTY IS AT A TRENDY Harlem restaurant, in the private rooms downstairs. It is crowded and, for a science event, glamorous. Many women are in sparkly cocktail dresses. Men are wearing expensive ties. Everyone has fashionable eyewear. Over at the bar is the goateed Joe LeDoux, known for his groundbreaking research on fear, as well as for his rock ’n’ roll band of scientists. The celebrity chef who owns the restaurant is personally greeting guests. This gathering is unusual for other reasons. A benefit for the Neuropsychoanalysis Foundation, it is celebrating the idea that psychoanalytic concepts like repressed impulses and unconscious drives remain important and relevant in this era of the neurobiological study of the brain. If that seems surprising, so will this: Sigmund Freud, the creator of psychoanalysis,…

BEYOND RUBIK’S CUBE Liberty Science Center, Jersey City, N.J. It’s been 40 years, believe it or not, since the first twist and turn of that multicolored, maddening cube. More than just the world’s best-selling puzzle, Rubik’s Cube has helped teach mathematics and problem solving, and has inspired projects by everyone from statisticians to artists (two groups rarely mentioned in the same sentence). This highly interactive exhibit celebrates every side, ahem, of the cube in a multimedia love letter to the enduring puzzle. Opens April 26. lsc.org — GEMMA TARLACH…

Microbiome research project American Gut hit the big time in 2013, garnering major media attention and drawing in thousands of participants. I was one of them. The crowdfunded endeavor offers a glimpse of how each person’s trillions of microbial passengers stack up compared with others. That’s right, now we can actually measure our own intestinal fortitude. And it’s relatively easy to participate. I signed up online, paid $99 and received a kit in the mail with a small tube and two swabs to take my choice of a stool, skin or saliva sample. I logged my diet for a week, entered the data on the project’s website and then mailed off my stool sample. Eight months later, I got my results: A single page of candy-colored graphs compared my guts…

1 Marco Polo’s famous 13th-century account of Asia is an encyclopedia of hoaxes, describing unicorns and a solid gold palace. 2 The claim that Polo introduced noodles to Europe is also a hoax — though more plausible than the first televised April Fool’s prank: In 1957 the BBC showed spaghetti being harvested from trees. Many viewers inquired where to buy a spaghetti plant. 3 Another hoax: that the April Fool’s tradition began with Renaissance calendar reform, when the new year was moved from April to January, and those ignorant of the switch were mocked. Small problem: The old Julian calendar started in January, too. 4 The real originator was Julius Caesar, who reserved April 1 to ridicule political enemies. They assassinated him on the Ides of March to avoid the…